Garden

September is coming to an end, but our garden is still going strong! The weather here has been averaging in the 80s so I guess that has been helping our garden hold on longer.

Today's bounty:

Luke will eat tomatoes like an apple. This is his second one.
And this is the face I get, accompanied by a "No." when I ask him to smile.

Look how our Garden Grows

My lack of blogging is directly correlated with my lack of picture taking lately. So I wrote this post first and then went around and took pictures of everything. Just.for.you.

The weather is crazy freezing cold to boiling hot. Our house was freezing cold all weekend and I found myself putting on winter clothes since we didn't want to turn the heater back on. Now it's hot again and I'm turning on the fans and opening the windows for cool breezes.

Despite the wacky weather, our garden is doing awesome. We have a strawberry growing and a few itty bitty peppers starting to grow! Growing a garden is so rewarding. Scott loves it to and we've really enjoyed working on it together.

our one strawberry.
Luke saw it today and tried to eat it!
I stopped him before he could pluck it off!Strawberry plants actually do better after the first year.

We are so eating that strawberry today ;)

The Garden

FINALLY, the weather helped us out a bit and allowed us to finish our Garden!
Last year we basically threw the plants and seeds in the bed and said "good luck!" We got a ton of yellow squash (which we never ate) and a ton of tomatoes (yay! we were happy about this) But only a few beans, one or two cucumbers and no bell peppers.

This year Scott and I wanted to do something different. My sister gave me a copy of Mel Batholomew's Square Foot Gardening for my birthday last year and I read it over a few times this winter. We constructed the boxes in March and painted them, but then they sat there empty for a long time until just this weekend when we finally filled them up with the special dirt and planted everything! It's going to be so much better this year!

They will look even better once we finish the path and the surrounding beds and put down mulch. For now, here's what they look like:

We planted: cucumbers, cilantro, bell peppers, jalapeno peppers, chili peppers, ancho peppers, several kinds of tomatoes, strawberries, and I snuck in a daisy plant because I love daisies and it's not sunny enough to put them in my porch pots. We're going to try to can Salsa this year--that's why we have so many peppers. Anyway, wish us luck! May the veggie gods treat us well this year!

Carrots.

I decided it was time to pull the carrots up out of the ground.
Here's what I got:


They are kind of funny looking.
They'd make pretty good creepy fingers for Halloween.

Maybe...

...we should reconsider canning this year...

Because they just keep coming!

Garden

Even a small garden brings forth plenty!!

We also got our first cucumber and a bunch of beans.
We're getting plenty of tomatoes--Luke loves when Dad feeds him tomatoes.

The Bug.

More pictures of Luke & the bug we played with the other day because that's the kind of bug I don't mind.

Trying to step on it.



My favorite picture


and after all that we put the poor bug in a jar for a while before letting it go. I hope it doesn't tell its creepy buggy friends to come and get us for that.

First Crop of the Season!

We picked our very first veggie from our garden this weekend--a squash.

The tomatoes are starting to come on and we are sure to have plenty of them! We will also be getting lots of squash and beans too. I planted carrots too, but I'm not quite sure how I'm going to know when to pick them when they are underground?? We shall see. My bell pepper plants are kind of small, but one is growing a little pepper so I know they aren't dying.

WooHoo to fresh veggies!

24 of the Easiest Houseplants You Can Grow

Last year about this time I was taking a plant class at BYU. I learned over a hundred different kinds of plant names--but mostly I learned that having plants in our homes is not only fun and pretty but really good for our homes in a healthy kind of way. Plants help keep the air cleaner and actually have an effect on our mood and work. On BHG (Better Homes & Gardens) i found an artical called 24 of the Easiest Houseplants you can Grow and every single one of them was a plant that I had to know in my class.

Of the 24, I personally would recommend:

Pothos--any variety


Philodendon--any variety


Zeezee plant


arrowhead vine


hoya


rubber tree


croton


Don't let their perfectly grown pictures fool you--it can be harder to make some of them so full and sometimes they are full and pretty because theirs 3 or so plants in the same pot.
I tried growing dracaena and it was ugly and I couldn't figure out how to make it prettier so I chucked it in the backyard.
Pothos and Philodendrons are really easy and looks great in just about any pot in any spot.
Rubber trees are really durable and many of these plants come back to full life if you accidentally water them too much or too little.
Some of the plants on the list (such as diffenbachia) are poisonous so having them in your home can actually be dangerous for your pets or children. They do make note of that in the article though.